Money

4 days in a row. Yesterday was my overtime day. I charged--surprise! The Monday supervisor, Helen, was out sick. One of our nurses was no call, no show. Full house of patients. Crazy families. Shrunken meth addicts. No reasoning with people like that. Full of emotion and anger. The problem with public hospitals is that sometimes this is the only place where our patients and their families have ever felt any sense of power--of being catered to--and boy, do they revel in it. They treat the nurses like waitresses. Nurses get victimized a lot--by the iron clad caste system of the hospital--by the patients who see them as a weird cross between maids and hookers. No wonder we get so weird and hard. Hooray, they think, finally someone for me to boss around. The problem with poor people bossing you around is they don't know how to do it properly.
Ugh.
Since my father used to work for one of our attending's father-in-law in Pakistan, it is apparently no secret that my family has MONEY (butter on saltines predilections aside). One of the things that is misunderstood about this is that you can have a lot of MONEY but not a lot of cash. I still live off my paycheck--but true, some of the bigger worries about the future that plague people in poverty aren't mine. I guess the best way to put it is that I struggle--but I'm not going to fall too far if it all goes to hell. It's the problem when you have a bunch of people living off a big old pile. Anyways, I guess the secret's out, because yesterday we were sitting in rounds, and our new trauma attending, McQuinn--big guy, balding, genial, kind--but a little rough around the edges--turns to me and says, "Did you realize that there's a website where everyone can look up everyone else's salary?"
"Of course It's the blue book."
"Am I in it?" he asked.
"I don't know. I never look. I advise you not to. It will just make you bitter."
One of the residents pipes up: "We're all in it."
Only doctors were in the room, no other nurses or other staff. They wouldn't have dared to have this conversation with anyone else.
"Let's look everybody up!"
So we went through all the attendings--astounding. I shook my head. Thought about my very respectable $46,000 I made with my nights and overtime. Tried to feel virtuous. But, man, looking at those numbers--all those zeroes!--it can grate.
"Wow, look at me!" McQuinn says. He smiles innocently. "They really recruited me."
I'm struck by how open everyone is in the room about this. My people are so weird about money. It's never okay to talk about in my family. You're just supposed to pretend you don't have it. I think I've written about this before. My Nana said you never want to talk about your money or anyone elses because a) you don't want someone who has less money than you to feel badly, or feel that you value their friendship any less because of their pecuniary status and b)you don't want someone who has more than you to feel you value them because they have a lot of money. So this happy crassness is sort of refreshing, but it's also sort of uncomfortable. Jay's like this, too--kind of crass about money.
Then he looks at me--"I hope this is okay to talk about in front of you--"he looks unsure. And I think, hmmmm...someone's been talking.
"That's okay. It's just a way for the proletariat to know who to line up against the wall first." I deadpan. Nervous laughter.
Money. Moneymoneymoneymoneymoney. That's a line from that funny old movie--Our Man Godfrey.
Moneymoneymoneymoneymoney.

That's my 1/2 hour.
Everyone laughs nervously